


Just a Moment.

by Eccentric_Time_Traveller



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (1963), Doctor Who (2005), Faction Paradox (Books & Audio)
Genre: Alternate Timelines, Genocide, Time Shenanigans, Time War (Doctor Who), Time War Angst (Doctor Who)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-08
Updated: 2021-01-08
Packaged: 2021-03-18 19:40:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,873
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28623441
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Eccentric_Time_Traveller/pseuds/Eccentric_Time_Traveller
Summary: The War is coming to an end, an old man faces a big red button. Gallifrey falls, what would’ve happened if The Tenth & Eleventh Doctors were never taken back into their own history. What would’ve happened if he pushed the button?
Kudos: 5





	Just a Moment.

No more, he thought.  
  


The old man could feel the familiar molten glow of amber and brass spin and weave itself around his decrepit wrinkly fingers. His body wouldn’t last for too long now, he’s wearing thin. The rose red glint of the artefact in front of him was an eye-sour, he couldn’t help but think that was purposeful on the interface’s part, little payback for his rambling about wanting a big red button. The War would soon meet its end.

No more Homeworlds, no more Great Houses, no more Daleks, no more Celestis, no more Nightmare Children, no more Factions, no more Remote, no more Could’ve Been Kings, no more Army of Meanwhiles, no more suffering, 

_and no more him either..._

The War would end with him, and he would end with The War. He couldn’t be The Doctor again, not after this. This was his ending. This was what he deserved. 

He took his gaze away from the artefact, taking a few brisk steps outside the aged and brittle barn he found himself in. The Suns were beginning to slink away, toward the ever expansive horizon, the two fluffy balls of white now fiery and fierce oranges, accompanied by the tangerine coloured sky that surrounded them.

There was something unique about Gallifreyan weather, it always looked like it was Dusk or Dawn, no matter where you went. He thought it was fitting, the weather never changed and neither did the society. Stagnancy incarnate. That was their legacy, and what a legacy to be proud of. An aging culture stuck in an endless loop of reliving past glories. Only taking up initiative when it was too late.

He made sure he couldn’t see The Tardis, no speck of blue to be seen in the barren desert ahead of him. He thought of how they met. Despite what some may tell you, it wasn’t really this “Big with a capital B” thing.

He had a meeting for reasons that aren’t particularly relevant right now, and even if they were relevant, he still probably wouldn’t ever disclose, old men need their secrets. And while he was walking down a corridor at The Citadel, he noticed a Timeship was going to be scrapped soon. It was a vintage model, definitely. He swore he might have seen it at a museum once when he was just a wee Loomling. It was in its default form, a big and bright white brick, around the height of a person.

Simplest shape in creation, to think that all those abstract symbols, impossible geometry, and living mathematics shaping and spiralling around in the fabric of history, resonating through a simple bit of coral, constrained and grown into just a little box. Though when looking back, there was something about it that gave him the feeling it was yearning for a shape of more... _C_ _haracter_

Needless to say, she was heavenly, exquisite, enchanting, beguiling, arresting, winsome, et cetera and et cetera. Truthfully, no matter how hard you tried you would never find a word to describe the feeling he had in his chest when he first saw her.

That feeling which wraps itself around your heart and your stomach when you realise you had just seen someone do something which was so uniquely _them_ that you just couldn’t help but smile and think “Oh bugger, I’ll be stuck with you forever, won’t I?”

If you’ve ever been in love, you know it. And if you haven’t, you couldn’t possibly imagine.

He couldn’t help but just hurry inside; he ditched his meeting, his job, and all of his fellow Time-Lords, all for just a silly little beautiful box like her — and to be honest — can you blame him?

And so that’s how it began, an old man and his box. The story of his life.

And this was how it will end.

Hopefully she’d move on without him, find someone else, a new fresh face she wanted to see the universe with. That would be nice, he thought.

He strode his way back to the artefact, closing the barn doors behind him. Enough reminiscing, they wouldn’t find him, there was no need to check. Arcadia was falling, that would keep The General’s War Council busy enough, and Rassilon’s High Council were already preoccupied arranging their final sanction, their “ascension.” Fat load of good that worked out to be for The Celestis though, at least their sanction was polite enough to leave the rest of existence in tact.

His hands trembled above the red gem, he could feel the whole force of Time around him. His people could feel everything, they saw into the infinite potential, they saw every variation which sprung from their actions, overlapping, ghost-futures which they could nudge to and from, try turn events in their favour, if ever so slightly. The War had only made this worse, Time had frayed so much he could see fluxing potential change and spew and erase all at once all the time.

He was existing on so many planes, he could feel himself between so many timelines. New pasts and new presents tried to drape themselves around him like a cloak made from history itself, trying to hold tight around him, hold him in place and stop him from doing it.

He was woven from the material of The Human Penelope & The Time-Lord Ulysses. He was the reincarnation of Gallifrey’s lost architect. He was just a ordinary full blood gallifreyan.

He was in The Deca, a group for the smartest academy students. He was a horrible student, only getting 51% on his second attempt for his final grade at the academy.

He was 900 years old. He was over thousands of years old. He was barely 4. He was billions of years old.

He grew up in The House of Lungburrow. He grew up in an old barn in the dry lands. He wasn’t even a time-lord, he was a human inventor from the 42nd century. He was a refugee from The House of Dooclare fleeing from the enemy who overran his home. 

And yet it all came to here, this _moment,_ and when he looked at what he was going to do, there was only one option he could see...

This would stop everything, restart it, reframe it, renew it. Like a debug manual for existence itself, a soft reboot. To think of how much of original would be sliced out, stuck inside the time-lock. Everything The War had touched would be gone — across every timeline — every version of the War. The only wall keeping this hell from what was coming next. His people would be wiped away from every reality, burned out of the world and locked away into a non-history.

He would be the greatest murder in history. This wasn’t only one timeline, this was all timelines. Every variation of events would be effected. Infinite casualties. This would create the only island of stability in the jerky, frothing, bubbling, and boiling sea of infinite potential that was now the universe, Gallifrey was gone, and its place would be this, this singular _moment_ of time would be the anchor of which the rest of the spiral policy of history would be built around. 

He used to be so comfortable with dealing out death. He thought nothing of it; you cannot flinch from what you are after all. He was a warrior that acted as a grim reaper for not only The Daleks but The Time-Lords alike, because after all, who can tell the difference anymore? A nameless thing that was soaked in the blood of those who were and neverwere, being steeped in horror was mundane for him.

But now, facing the end of his life. He finds himself afraid, afraid of the tidal loneliness within him that could swallow up anything he wanted it to, he wishes he could say it wasn’t there anymore.

Being afraid wasn’t something new to him. In fact, before The War, he felt fear quite often, he seldom felt it during The War though. He had quite the unique relationship with it. Most people when they were afraid opted to run away or try fight what was making them afraid, he thought these options however were quite banal, positively dull. So instead he would talk, he thought that was a lot more interesting. Only occasionally running away so he could think about what he was going to say next. Oh, he used to be such a chatterbox. 5 million languages and he loved every one of them.

And yet now, feeling the most afraid he had ever been in all his 9 lives, feeling the dread engulf him, resonating and rattling through all of his bones, feeling the need to just say something, anything, just to make it diminish, even if only slightly.

He had nothing to say.

The old man closed his eyes, pressing down on the artefact, expecting to die with along with everything else.

He envisioned a flash, something as bright as a thousands suns collapsing into each other for the briefest second, the atmosphere around him disintegrating, the spiral arms of the Galaxy being ripped off. An extermination that was so profound in its magnitude that it stretched deep into the past and far into the future, stretching and wrapping and tightening around the war, constricting it, choking it until it suffocated.

He imagined the constant fighting, he imagined fleets of Cwejen, whole armies of entangle men with Biodata stretched into a Mobius loop, the thousand year battles, the waves of retro-wars, the nightmare children born from people shoving too many bits of frayed timelines together until it became something else entirely, the new homeworlds and their new unique histories and cultures being destroyed just as fast as they were created, all the years that never were as so many species died in different ways all at the same time and feeling them all again and again, legions of Tardises being cannibalised into fleets of Paradox Machines, whole worlds like Utterlost being turned into sites of total confusion, suns blinking out of time, galaxies being torn to shreds.

He imagined a wave of light coming to them in every battle, even battles he was apart of, washing over everything, washing over the troops, washing over the timelines, washing over those past versions of himself. Cleansing it all away.

Instead, a deafening silence weighed against his ears. There was no blaze of glory, nothing big or bombastic.

Just... Loss. 

Like having a chunk of your soul being torn out. All he could feel was absence, that ever so subtle telepathic connection between them all, just shut out. He can’t feel them there anymore.

His people were gone... and yet he remained.

Or at least, he felt like he remained. Perhaps he only thought he was alive and in fact, he was well and truly dead. Was this the afterlife, was this hell; a deafening silence and a never ending blackness which filled all he could see? Just a void and his thoughts — for all eternity. A fitting punishment, he thought.

Until he realised that his eyes were still closed.

‘Daft old man.’ He couldn’t help but cough out a bitter chuckle... 

**Author's Note:**

> Decided to edit this and trim a bit that I felt wasn’t really needed and weaker than the rest, mentioning this just in case anyone who read the original decided to reread. But let’s be honest — what’s the likelihood of that, happening? 👀


End file.
